More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby Page A

team, but is powerfully good on what the town’s obsession with football costs its kids. It’s not just the ones who don’t make it, or become damaged along the way, all of whom get chucked away like ribs stripped of their meat (and catastrophically uneducated before they’ve been rejected); the kids who can’t play football are almost worthless. The girls spend half their time cheerleading and cake-baking for the players, and the students with more cerebral interests are ignored. In the season that Bissinger followed the team, the cost of rush-delivered postgame videotapes that enabled the coaches to analyze what had gone right and wrong was $6,400. The budget for the entire English department was $5,040. And the team used private jets for away games on more than one occasion. Isn’t it great how little you need to spend to inculcate a passion for the arts? Perhaps I have drawn the wrong conclusion.
    David Almond’s My Name Is Mina is an extraordinary children’s book by the author of Skellig , one of the best novels written for anyone published in the last fifteen years. And this new book is a companion piece to Skellig , a kind of prequel about the girl who lives next door. It’s also, as it turns out, a handbook for anyone who is interestedin literacy and education as they have been, or are being, applied to them or their children or anybody else’s children:
    Why should I write something so that somebody could say I was well below average, below average, average, above average, or well above average? What’s average? And what about the ones that find out they’re well below average? What’s the point of that and how’s that going to make them feel for the rest of their lives? And did William Blake do writing tasks just because somebody else told him to? And what Level would he have got anyway?
    â€œLittle Lamb, Who mad’st thee?
Dost thou know who mad’st thee?”
    What level is that?
    Almond’s wry disdain for the way we sift our children as if they were potatoes killed me, because I was once found to be below average, across the board, at a crucial early stage in my educational career, and I have just about recovered enough confidence to declare that this judgment was, if not wrong, then at least not worth making. I think that, like everybody, I’m above average at some things and well below at others.
    My Name Is Mina is a literary novel for kids, a Blakean mystic’s view of the world, a fun-filled activity book for a rainy day (“EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY—Write a poem that repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word until it almost loses its meaning”), a study of loneliness and grief, and it made more sense to me than half the fiction I usually read. This can’t be right, and I won’t allow it to be right. For literary purposes only, I am off to call my wife obscenities and bounce her up and down on a mattress. As I write, she’s upstairs, helping my youngest son with his homework, so she’s in for a shock.

JUNE 2011
BOOKS BOUGHT:
    Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America —Lawrence W. Levine
    Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture —John Seabrook
    The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism —Thomas W. Evans
    The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America —James Sullivan
    London Belongs to Me —Norman Collins
BOOKS READ:
    Unfamiliar Fishes —Sarah Vowell
    Norwood —Charles Portis
    The Imperfectionists —Tom Rachman
    Mr. Gum and the Power Crystals —Andy Stanton
    Mr. Gum and the Dancing Bear —Andy Stanton
    M y friendship with the writer Sarah Vowell—history buff, TV and radio personality, occasional animated character—is now fifteen years old. For the first decade or so, it was pretty straightforward: